Posts Tagged ‘weird’

I was upstairs this morning, trying to put away some laundry, when I head blood-curdling screams coming from downstairs where the kids were playing. Fearing some horrible scene awaiting my discovery, I bolted down to the living room.

From Wikipedia.

To my surprise, the kids both had huge grins on their faces as they ran back and forth across the living room, shrieking at the top of their lungs all the while.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

“Playing screaming,” our three year-old answered matter-of-factly, as though this should have been completely obvious.

The Cosgrove CD was a Christmas present from the grandparents to our three year-old son, while the Neubauten album is something I’ve had in one format or another for many years.

That a couple of preschoolers would enjoy listening to treacly tween pop isn’t the least bit surprising, but their enjoyment of Einstürzende Neubauten is only surprising until you stop and think about it for a moment:

What do toddlers and early preschoolers enjoy doing? Banging and scraping stuff together loudly, especially if they’re metal pots and pans, with occasional random screaming.

What has Einstürzende Neubauten made a career out of doing? Banging and scraping stuff together loudly, with occasional screaming.

Add the two together, and of course little kids are going to like avant-garde German industrial music from the mid 1980s. They haven’t had the chance to form a preconceived opinion that it’s strange yet; all they know is that it sounds kind of like what they like doing anyway.

Add processed pop music targeted at kids to the mix, and they’re all over it — which is how we ended up with Einstürzende Cosgrove playing in the living room, over and over again, all morning. To them, that isn’t weird at all. I, on the other hand, was ready to curl up into a little ball muttering, “Can’t sleep – clowns will eat me,” by lunchtime.

I can’t help but wonder what a DJ mashup of the two albums would sound like, if only for the entertainment value provided by potential track titles like “Kissin’ Yü-Gung” or “Shakespeare Brennt.”

There have been some extra weird search engine queries taking people to this site over the last week:

“Turkey bidet toilet combo” — As much as it baffles me that someone would be scouring the Internet for this word combination, I was even more confused by my inability to recall ever having used the word “bidet” here. It turns out my memory was wrong: here it is, from November 2008. The same post begins by mentioning High School Musical. I must have a sicker mind that I previously believed.

Continuing with the international theme, “German Slanket” — I’m not sure what would make a Slanket German. Would it be in the colors of the German flag, or would it yell, “MACH SCHELL!” if you don’t flip through channels using your TV remote quickly enough?

“Pennsylvania Dutch food humor” — Exhibit A: Scrapple. Exhibit B: Cup Cheese. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t actually eat any of those things; we just like seeing tourists wince at the sight of them. The funniest of all are the tourists who decide to be brave and eat them; the joke’s on you, folks.

“Chemistry funny” — Yes, chemistry is very funny. I found balancing chemical equations to be a delightful hoot in high school.

From Cafepress.com

“Chupacabra crossing signs” — I never thought of such a thing before seeing those words together just now. Now, having seen them, I’m not sure how it’s possible for my life to go on without one. I MUST HAVE A CHUPACABRA CROSSING SIGN FOR MYSELF!

“Quotes about long winded stories” — I once knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy’s cousin who’s twice-related sister-in-law’s mother’s daughter knew this guy who knew this guy who knew this guy who once said something about Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. But to put it into proper context, we’ll have to go back to the War of the Austrian Succession . . .

“Mechanical parrots” — Unlike the chupacabra crossing sign, these are things I could really do without.

“The best Yugo” — Speaking of things I don’t want . . .

“la-veterana@hotmit.liver” — This can’t possibly be a legit email address, unless the nation of hepatitis has its own domain now.

So there’s a rundown of some of the search terms that have brought some really twisted people to this site over the past week. Luckily for them, I’ve been twisted enough to have somehow created content that would send them here in the first place.

Thanks to this post, it’s only a matter of time before I start getting hits for “hepatitis” combined with something else weird, too. Now that I think about it, “nation of hepatitis” is a weird enough phrase on its own.

What would be the most utterly revolting restaurant name ever? I vote “The Hepatitis Bidet.”

I was driving to my parents’ house, my car loaded with groceries, when I noticed something out of the ordinary in their neighborhood. A very large, very misshapen, vaguely anthropomorphic deer was weaving from house to house, knocking on front doors. Strangely, the neighborhood seemed to be abandoned.

I didn’t think anything of it as I pulled into the garage and closed the door behind me. While unloading the groceries in the house, my parents’ parrot began squawking, “BRAAAAK, Something’s not right, BRAAAAK!”

“When did they get a parrot,” I wondered.

Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head, from Wikipedia

There was a knock on the door a moment later. From a slight part in the dining room curtains, I could see a large deer that looked like the love child of a muppet and Richard III. I didn’t answer the door.

“Umm… Hey,” a strangely nerdy-sounding voice emanated from within the hulking, hunchbacked deer muppet, its google eyes flailing wildly. “Uhh, Dwayne De Rosario told me this was the place to get your ears waxed in sensory deprivation tanks, so I’m, umm, assimilating the whole bread loaf.

“Uhh, anyway, I’ll be around from now on… So, uhh, you’ll be seeing me, umm, around and stuff.” The deerlike creature staggered off across the street to another house, repeating the word “Brains” under its breath the whole way.

I shrugged it off and began putting away groceries. Soon, the dull thud of an enormous suctioned tentacle against the front door echoed through the house. Another surprisingly dorky voice came from the direction of the door.

“Hi. This is Sid. Uhh, Sid The Octopus. I was sent here by Toby Keith Urban Outfitters to elevate your coffee to the fourth plane… Anybody home? … No? … Well, I’ll, uhh, just leave the dominoes on the front porch. Tally ho!”

By this time I’d gone upstairs. I glanced down at the backyard from a second story bedroom window, and I could see a gigantic, green ostrich with burning red eyes doing neck rolls on the back porch, and a huge gorilla skulking across the back yard.

And the moral of this story is to never eat string cheese just before bedtime.

I’d like to believe this is part of some colossal in-joke, but I sadly fear that’s not the case:

As if this video wasn’t insane enough from the outset, at around 5:10 the guy starts talking about the time he took a bunch of nature spirits to a Chinese restaurant, and the elves started eating the chopsticks because bamboo’s one of their favorite foods.

I was, for a brief moment, feeling a surge of ambition course through my veins as I sat down to compose a profound rumination of what it means to be an American. Then I saw this clip of a little old lady in a wheelchair firing off a few rounds with a machine gun and rambling about shooting somebody “in his toodles.” It’s clearly a more eloquent statement of who we are as a nation than anything I could possibly say.

Like this:

I just returned from a trip to the Gulf Coast, and while there I saw what just might be the best introduction to a political campaign commercial ever: “I’m Young Boozer, and, yes, that’s my real name.”

I kid you not. The guy’s running for Alabama state treasurer in the upcoming Republican primary there.

If your last name is “Boozer,” why the heck would you ever consider naming your kid “Young?”

There are rare moments of monumental discovery that redefine the limits of human potentiality. One such glimmer of our collective greatness occurred recently when I happened upon a box of “Champion Mango Flavored Pineapple.”

If people are capable of taking one fruit and making it taste somewhat like the chemical approximation of another fruit, we are champions indeed.

So many burning questions arise from the contemplation of mango-flavored chunks of dried pineapple that cut to the very core of our being. Why create something like this at all? Why not just sell a mixture of dried mangoes and dried pineapples if you want to get the flavor of both? Or, if you just want the mango flavor, why not just use mangoes? Why instead take a bunch of dried pineapples and sprinkle them with magic mango-ish pixie dust (called “natural mango flavor” on the label, whatever that’s supposed to mean)?

Why climb a mountain? We climb it because it is there, and because we can. Such is the power and wonder of our ambition.

One would think that the good people of Gävle, Sweden would have gotten the hint by now. Their 43 foot high straw Yule/Christmas goat was just set alight yet again. It’s been burned down 24 times since the first goat was erected in 1966. That one was burned down, too. The goat has also suffered dismemberment and was once even run over with a car. Here’s the news report from when it was burned in 2005 as well.

Even weirder, the goat’s penultimate tweet was tangentially related to Tiger Woods: “Elin Nordegren (still married to T Woods) might be on her way to Gävle to celebrate Christmas with her mom at the castle. Twin sister here!”

Still, the goat seems to have a sense of humor about its travails, having also tweeted, “Santa Claus and a ginger bread guy set me on fire a few years ago – using flaming arrows. The competition is hard!”

I don’t know about you, but I would have gladly paid to see Santa Claus and a gingerbread man shoot a giant straw goat full of flaming arrows.

Maybe it’s time that Gävle takes a different approach to the goat’s struggle to exist. Embrace the annual arson. Turn it into a festival. Just imagine: BURNING GOAT!